In recent years, the left has transformed traditional approaches to literature and culture. Critical movements such as cultural materialism and new historicism have succeeded to the point where they now constitute the new academic order. This book explains and demonstrates the power of these modes of critical enquiry, and explores their limitations. It provides a critical engagement with major figures in the field - Francis Barker, Catherine Belsey, Jonathan Dollimore, Terry Eagleton, Jonathan Goldberg, Stephen Greenblatt, Alan Sinfield - whose work represents a broad spectrum of positions, from Marxism that privileges class to a radical criticism emphasizing the politics of difference. The book problematizes a number of fundamental Marxist assumptions with recourse to the heterological and general economic theories of Georges Bataille. In the process, cultural materialist practice is developed and extended in practical readings of key Renaissance texts by, among others, Shakespeare and Spenser, and later work by Dollimore and Sinfield on queer theory, particularly with regard to Oscar Wilde.